Social Security: A Debt-Threatened Dream

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federal employees to retire early on a civil service pension, work for a few years in a job in private industry, and qualify for a Social Security pension too. But any proposal for such change faces two serious obstacles. Federal employees constitute a significant lobbying force, and included in their numbers are Senators and Congressmen, a group not famous for voting against its self-interest—ever.

> Rewrite benefit formulas. A change in the complex formulas for calculating benefits, in order to give a newly retired worker an initial pension representing a somewhat lower percentage of what he earned in his last years on the job, could produce large long-run savings. It also would return the Social Security system to Roosevelt's idea of basic minimum protection against poverty, and would prod those now working to save more for their retirement. Encouraging savings is a goal that hardly any economist, conservative or liberal, will quarrel with.

In the end, the solution to Social Security's double dilemma—of an immediate cash crisis and the threat of a long-range demographic disaster—is unlikely to come from any single approach. What is needed is a combination of steps: some immediate limitation on COLAS, some intermediate move to prevent inflation from pushing up benefits faster than the rise in wages and payroll taxes, some long-range measures to raise the retirement age and keep the formula for calculating benefits from straining the resources of society.

The danger is that Congress and the Administration will do none of the above. Instead, they are all too likely to let the system drift closer to the point at which the money runs out, then enact a series of emergency proposals—and trust to luck.

To change the system so that it can both surmount the current money shortage and continue providing protection to the elderly and disabled without placing an intolerable burden on the young involves making the kind of choices that politicians so far have been running from, with irresponsible cowardice.

Chicago Social Security Expert Kutza summarizes the problem: "Everyone knows the range of possible solutions. There has been panel after panel, discussion after discussion; every single option has been documented. The only real question is: Which political leader is willing to bite that bullet?" The answer right now seems to be nobody, because every suggested solution will offend some powerful group. But the reconciliation of conflicting interests is the real art of politics. In this case, some form of reconciliation is a social necessity. —By George J. Church. Reported by Hays Corey and Jeanne Saddler/ Washington, with other U.S. bureaus

*Social Security check No.1 for $22.54 went in January to Ida Fuller of Brattleboro Vt. who had paid a total or $22 in Social Security taxes. Fuller drew her last monthly check for $112.60 in December 1974 shorty after her 100th birthday. By then she had collected $20,944.42 in return for her $22. *Secretary of the treasury Donald Regan, Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan, and secretary of Health and Human Services Richard Schweiker